One of the first things that I put into place at FamZoo was a task management system (this will come as no surprise to any of you poor souls who have worked with me in the past ;-). The system allows me to effectively plan, organize, and track all of my work. The number of tasks that go into building a company and a product can be pretty overwhelming. I discover scores of new tasks that need to get done every day. Having a place to park and coherently organize all of those tasks gives me real peace of mind. To provide a little insight into how I divide my time, I extracted the data for the tasks that I have completed so far and did a little quick Excel analysis. Here are some charts of the tasks I have completed so far grouped by highest level category (you can click on them to get a larger view):

Some quick observations:

Initially, items other than product development sucked up a fair portion of my time - particularly legal items related to incorporation and trademarking (using Cooley). Later, I had to allot some significant time to finance tasks related to setting up my accounting (using Montgomery Professional Services Corp) and getting QuickBooks Online up and running. Now, fortunately, I am almost 100% on product development tasks which is really where I want to be spending all of my cycles right now.

Not surprisingly, my productivity (as measured by closed tasks which is not a true measure of productivity, but probably a reasonable proxy in my case) tanked during the holidays. The troughs line up with Thanksgiving (week 47, 2006), Christmas and New Years (weeks 51, 52 of 2006 and week 1 of 2007). The low weeks prior to that (weeks 40-43 of 2006) were dominated by iterations on the logo design and think-time/research around the product which tends to be hard to quantify.

I haven't spent much time on a formal business plan, opting instead to focus as much time as possible on the product itself. See here for a discussion about a recent study written up in the WSJ covering the lack of statistical correlation between formal written business plans and ultimate success. We'll see how it turns out for me ;-)

It will be interesting to see how the allocation mix changes over time. I expect several more weeks of very heads down product development. Then, we should see some considerable percentage of time on Technical Operations as I transition from pure development mode and open up FamZoo to more outside Beta users. Having a production Web hosting solution in place will be a prerequisite for this step. As I get closer to launch, more and more of my time will be dominated by Marketing and Business Development activities.